Everything that happens, no matter how it hurts your heart, has good in it for you, great good in it for you. This is impossible for you to see at the time. You may never see. The whole world may never see, and yet the gold is there.
No matter how dire circumstances may feel to you, there is a plum somewhere there for you. You don’t have to find it. What you have to do is to move forward. It is necessary for you to let go of all that you reproach. You simply have to, beloveds. Come from the place where a bumpy road is no less a road, and it leads somewhere. One beauty of being lost in the forest is that a clearing lies ahead.
I hear you say: “Well, God, if a bear eats me in the forest before I get to the glade, you’re telling me that there’s something good in that?”
Yes, I am telling you that there is something good in that.
“And I break a leg, there is something good in that?”
Yes.
“And if my beloved dies, there is something good in that?”
Yes. And it’s also clear that you will go around in circles trying to figure out what can possibly be good about something that causes you great unhappiness. The purposefulness of all that occurs in life stands on its own. We are talking of something out of the range of your eyesight. On the surface of life, thinking the way the world thinks, what can be the good of anything you don’t want? Yet We are not talking about the surface. We are talking of something far deeper than the crust of life that you see and can only poke holes in.
And here’s the thing, no one says you have to like everything that occurs in life. No one says you will like everything or that you will find everything just or justifiable in the land of the consciousness in which you live. There are many angles that life can be viewed through. What may be tragic from one view can be beautiful from another view that at present you cannot possibly imagine. Come to a state where you let go of the ideas you have kept and which, frankly, hold you back from moving forward. Like a movie reel, you are not to stay stuck.
When, as you see it, life has to reward you according to your terms, you have a struggle on your hands. Life has to be nothing but what it is. Many of your ideas are possessions, and you hold them to you dearly, and these very ideas hold you back from living life with joy. When such and such has to be this way and not that, barriers get put up and it’s harder for you to get past them. Borders keep you from getting to one place from another. When you feel suffering, it is essential that you get out of the mind frame you are in. You are the one who has to change. Only you.
When you feel suffering, it is you who is torturing yourself. You are everything. If you are aggrieved, you are the aggriever, the grief, and the process of grieving. Just as when you love, you are the one who loves, the beloved, and you are the process of loving as well.
When you hold on to suffering, who is responsible? Unless you want to continue to suffer, who has to provide another way? Who is going to do it for you? Who can do it for you? When you sit in the dark, who is responsible for your getting up and turning on the light? When the shades in the room you sit in block out the sun, who has to get up to pull up the shades?